Letters From Columbia: More Thoughts on BioShock Infinite’s Mysteries

We still can’t stop talking about BioShock Infinite. We’re going to force ourselves to, but first, here’s our second and last round of essays from Wired writers about what we’re still thinking about after finishing Irrational Games’ masterpiece.

In our last set of letters, Wired fellow Jensen Toperzer, contributor John Mix Meyer and I talked about the game’s playful, powerful messages about free will and its parallels to works in other mediums such as The Dark Tower and There Will Be Blood. This time, we get into the game’s extraordinary use of music, emotional attachments to the character of Elizabeth and the religious and political themes at play in the game’s city of Columbia.

What your letters illustrate to me is just how deep the BioShock Infinite rabbit-hole goes, and in how many directions at once. I have a feeling there’s still a lot to be discovered, Jensen, in terms of those little details like the state of Elizabeth’s choker throughout the game. Or, Mix, the role that religion plays: Infinite, for all the ballyhoo prior to its release, does not in the end feel like the full-throated critique or satire of Tea Party politics that it initially seemed to be.

Knowing what we do now about the origins of Comstock, it seems more of a cautionary tale: We tell ourselves just-so stories to avoid having to deal with negative aspects of ourselves we’d rather not confront. Booker massacred Native Americans at Wounded Knee, and the baptism promised to wipe those sins away. And it worked all too well, since he (now “reborn” as Comstock) internalized those feelings of self-righteousness and created a society in which non-whites were recast as enemies deserving of that punishment. People, whether on the left or right or wherever, do this on a smaller scale all the time; we dehumanize those who disagree with us to make it easier to indulge our worst impulses and lash out at them, often in ways that completely contradict our perceived notions of ourselves as open-minded and tolerant.

Booker — the one we played — rejected baptism, which you could read as a rejection of religion but also as a more general rejection of a one-size-fits-all solution to life’s problems, of adopting a Truth that lets you off the hook as far as any further critical thinking. Booker, when Elizabeth questions the white and colored bathrooms, says it “just is” that way. He doesn’t question the status quo, but importantly, neither does he have a prepared answer for Elizabeth to justify why different races have to use separate bathrooms, as Comstock surely would.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was music.

I got to play the first four hours of BioShock Infinite at a preview event in December, and I paid close attention (maybe more than anyone at Irrational expected) to exactly what songs were being played during the game. As I heard snippets of lyrics, I jotted them down, and looked up the full songs later. I ended up putting the results of my findings into a story that month, with my initial interpretations of what was going on.

While the previous two BioShock games were also liberally sprinkled with period music that helped to create the vibe of Rapture, it soon became apparent that the songs in Infinite were much more tightly linked thematically. The connection between the songs in the first four hours was “If you leave me, I’ll die”: Lovers parting acrimoniously, a despondent lover’s suicide, one’s world utterly collapsing after being left behind. Of course, at the time it was difficult to imagine what exactly these lyrical links were referring to, but it’s clear now: Booker’s love for his daughter, and the tragic and terrible way that they were separated.

And of course, there are many more references to later events in the game. Time loops:

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, by and by?

Multiple universes with constants and variables:

You’re to blame, baby, for what I do
I know that I can be beggar, I can be king
I can be almost any old thing
It all depends on you.

The deaths of Booker, Comstock and Songbird:

Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown.

There is, of course, more music in the final game that adds to the theme. One great addition that I don’t really think I have to explain is “Tainted Love.” Even the title! But there’s more. Some of this stuff was tucked away well enough that I didn’t notice it at first, but check out the opening verse to “Button Up Your Overcoat”:

Listen, big boy,
Now that you got me made,
Goodness, but I’m afraid,
Somethin’s gonna happen to you!
Listen, big boy,
You gotta be hooked, and how,
I would die if I should lose you now!

Oh, and when you go to Rapture briefly, they play one of the period songs from the original BioShock soundtrack, “Beyond the Sea.” Why, is this a song about being apart from a loved one? Do you even have to ask?

What other videogame has this much hidden in it, waiting to be found if you examine every line of every song, every bit of dialogue? What else in this medium is so carefully detailed? What a joy to examine something more closely and have your efforts so richly rewarded!

What else have you two found?

Chris

Chris and Mix;

The music was a huge part of this game for sure. I’m not as able to comment on it as I’m a bit of an idiot when it comes to recognizing music accurately and understanding it (my usual reaction is “I like that thing I just heard! Hooray!”) but I still have to say, standing on Battleship Beach and suddenly realizing that the song I was hearing was “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” hammered home that this wasn’t Kansas anymore, it wasn’t even 1912 anymore, it was something else. Then there were the little things about the tears: the way that the first tear you see Elizabeth opens goes to a 1983 Paris, but not one that even we, the players know. The film on the marquee? It’s Revenge of the Jedi, which was the original working title for Return of the Jedi. And then we re-visit that 1983 later in Comstock House, where an aged Elizabeth looks down on the destruction as Columbia firebombs New York City.

To me, though, there was something in this game bigger than those little moments, and it comes back to Comstock House. It doesn’t take very much to get me intellectually invested in a game—give me a challenge and you’ve got my attention. I mean I’m the kind of person who digs Kingdom Hearts despite it being an incomprehensible mess. It takes a very special kind of game to get an emotional investment out of me. I rarely cry at movies, I almost never cry for videogames, and other than the brief thrill of a jump scare I’m even more rarely afraid for any reason. But Comstock House? That was the most frightening thing I’ve ever encountered in a game, and I playedSystem Shock 2. The difference was this: in System Shock 2, I was afraid primarily for myself. Everyone around me was already dead, and the terror came from being very much alone save for a psychotic AI and a viral hivemind, both of which wanted not so much to kill me but to absorb my mind for their own twisted reasons.

In Comstock House the fear came from me finding myself genuinely afraid for someone else. I—at that point rather fully invested in “inhabiting” Booker on some level—didn’t give a damn about myself. The Songbird took Elizabeth, and I was, at first, merely determined that I was going to go bash that thing’s head in until it gave her back. But then I walked across that bridge and into what was clearly a tear (a tear which I couldn’t avoid, there was no other path) and found that it was abruptly snowing, that I was in a place more reminiscent of Rapture or the Von Braun in its decrepit and terrifying grandeur, and worse, what did that mean for Elizabeth?

Then as you go through that house you hear her being tortured in each one of those tears, and you hear audiologs of her future self broken and driven mad, and then you get the slow realization that it’s all your fault. You didn’t come. You didn’t save her. Elizabeth is what she is because of you.

As I’m writing this and remembering it loops back around, because you get the later realization that Elizabeth was locked in a tower for years because of you. Because of both versions of you. It all comes back to being your damn fault. And it hurts! This, combined with how tense that whole area is, the creepy lighting, the Boys of Silence and their swarms of bullet-sponge enemies who drop no health or ammo, the lack of resources, the moments like the severed Washington head rolling towards you slowly in a wheelchair followed by, worst of all, nothing happening… by the time I met the Future Elizabeth, I was crying and actually saying, “No, Elizabeth, no.”

But why did I have that reaction? It comes back again to the little things. Elizabeth is the most fully realized non-player character I’ve ever encountered. I could watch her idle animations all day, and sometimes I’d just pause to see how she’d react to things and what she’d do. Little things like at the amusement park when she can grab free cotton candy (and she’s never had cotton candy before! She’s so cute when she reacts to it! Oh my gosh!), the way she reacts to everything at Battleship Bay, and even the way she just looks around at things, all of it subtly made me start to care about her. The scene at the shantytown bar where Elizabeth and Booker sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is doubly heartbreaking after you finish the game, and at the time is a wonderful quiet bonding moment that you could easily miss if you’re not a completionist. Then there’s the way that in battle, she in fact escorts you. In a very mechanical, visceral way, you need her. You get used to her presence, to her shouting “I’m still looking!” or tossing you just the thing you need to turn the tide of a firefight and in Comstock House, when she isn’t there, you feel her absence all the more keenly for the absence of those little things.

I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by Elizabeth. Going into the game and from all the promotional material you expect this to be a typical “Grizzled action dude rescues hot lady and a romance or something” garbage. Instead, Elizabeth is first off still by far the more dangerous of the pair of you, and while naive is probably also the wiser and more competent one. She takes care of you. In a lot of ways, she’s the real main character. Yeah, you rescue her from a tower, but she’s the one who pulls you through the rest of the narrative. And finally, it’s not a romantic love story, but a familial love story, one about fathers and daughters, and one which hit me pretty damn hard, especially at the end. That was nice to see. You could probably write a whole other complete essay about the symbolism of the dualistic abusive father embodied by Comstock and gruff but ultimately loving father in Booker (and the overprotective “Father” of the Songbird) and the way Elizabeth has to drown them all in the end, but that’s another story for another time.

Then, even after 1983 Elizabeth sends you back in time to rescue 1912 Elizabeth (note, again, that you’re not even capable of rescuing her on your own—she has to save herself, you’re only the tool that she uses to complete that action), “your” Elizabeth isn’t all better and back to her perky self. She’s a harder, colder person. Even her idle animations and talk change; she doesn’t look in wonder at things anymore, but instead simply looks for what you both need to survive. It’s heartbreaking. It’s perfect. I love it when a game breaks my heart.

The end result of all this is that I had a very strong emotional reaction to a character in a videogame, to a character who would in a game by any other studio be relegated to annoying escort mission status. Infinite succeeded where the first Bioshock failed with its Little Sisters: It made me care. And in the end, it all comes down to those little details.

– J

Hi again, Jensen and Chris!

You two are making me wish I was more musically inclined. I’m ashamed to admit that I couldn’t even really nod my head and say “yes, yes” as I read your insights regarding the game’s music. Even so, I think that’s what’s great about the game. It gets across so many different messages and themes to different people — everyone can take away something unique without sounding like a lunatic. I think the fact that the two of you are able to wax poetic on things that never occurred to me is a testament to the ability of Ken Levine and his team.

Columbia itself is a symbol of this. The upper class and the ruling elite separate themselves from the influence of the American government and build a city in the sky to celebrate individualism and ingenuity. But what do they do when they get there? They build monuments to the founding fathers, the very men of government they’ve attempted to break away from. They pray to these statues, even! In the industrial district stands a towering gold statue of Jeremiah Fink, a rich and powerful citizen of Columbia who runs the city’s manufacturing plants.

The people of Columbia think they’re championing capitalism and titans of industry. They think they’ve constructed an entirely new form of society. But really all they’ve done is trade in one god for another. Even Comstock, the founder and so-called prophet of Columbia, isn’t nurturing faith in a higher being. Instead it’s he who has taken the role of God.

Indeed, the only thing really separating Columbia and 1912 America is ideology. In both, xenophobia runs rampant, racial minorities are oppressed by both everyday citizens and the government, violence and crime is the norm and the poor vastly outweigh the wealthy.

Then there’s the Vox Populi, a revolutionist group made up of Columbia’s poor and downtrodden. In the beginning, you’re supposed to empathize with the group and it’s hard not to. Throughout the game, you witness several events of blatant racism, culminating in a trek through Columbia’s slums where you realize just how large the economic and social divide is. So when the Vox Populi begin their violent uprising, you feel compelled to fight along with them and so you do.

At one point, Elizabeth compares the Vox revolution to Les Miserables and at first it feels like an apt comparison. But then the Vox Populi’s uprising turns darker: They begin murdering indiscriminately, they lay waste to the city and in mere hours, the once picturesque city of Columbia is a nightmarish ruin of collapsed buildings and dark skies lit up with bullet fire.

At this point I wasn’t thinking of Les Miserables anymore. Instead I was reminded of the speeches of Malcolm X, but on a grander scale. And so Columbia fell to the weaknesses of mankind, just as it had been plagued from the beginning.

If BioShock Infinite had ended there, I would consider it a cynical work, whose themes convey messages of hopelessness. But as typical of a BioShock game, the ending turns the entire game upside down. Booker is a character tormented by his sins and weaknesses. In many ways, I think of him as an avatar for all of mankind. Haunted by violence, he seeks salvation and when he thinks he’s found it, he merely repeats his sins.

In the end, though, he’s ultimately able to make things right. He doesn’t change everything and he doesn’t fix the world’s problems. But he’s able to come to terms with himself and reach a new beginning.